Switch from SDL Tridion
April 12, 2014

Switch from SDL Tridion

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2009 and 2011

Overall Satisfaction

SDL Tridion was used as the solution for some of the client sites that I worked on.
  • Reusability. It uses a lot of modules that can be used in more than one location.
  • Deployment of source code. A sites dll's, JS and CSS can all be managed within SDL Tridion. This gives the power to an Admin to deploy new versions of the site without as much need for a systems engineer to assist.
  • Extremely flexible. A feature can be made in many ways. So if one doesn't work, try another.
  • User interface is very confusing unless you take classes on how to use it. Not very intuitive and hard to figure out how to do things on your own.
  • Due to the high flexibility there is a high risk of having sites without uniformity. every feature can be created in different ways. This can make troubleshooting extremely difficult for a developer to fix a bug or add a feature that will not break existing features. It can also cause duplicated code or features because a developer needs to create a feature and creates a new one that already existed elsewhere in the site simply because he/she could not find it or was unaware of it.
  • Content authors can be very dangerous. SDL Tridion has the potential to give Content Authors great power over their sites. Mistakes can be made that are difficult to recover from and take many hours to recover from.
  • I had no part in this process since I was the developer that implemented or supported the sites. However I do know that only the very large companies with large bank accounts used SDL Tridion and could justify the use and see an ROI. I would never recommend SDL Tridion for a small to mid sized company.
I feel that SDL Tridion's User Interface is to difficult for content authors to understand. I worked with a client that used Tridion for years and she still would get lost in the UI and had to ask questions. There was close to 30% of continual time spent on the project simply to figure out the UI.

I have also used Adobe CQ5 and Sitecore for other clients.

Adobe CQ5 is a complex UI, however it is very nice for content authors sue to the fact that it resembles what the site will actually look like when viewed by a user. Instead of just modules being added to a list and not really knowing how they will be ordered on the page.

Sitecore is an easy to use UI for both developer and content author. The UI resembles that of a desktop interface that everyone is use to already. This makes it intuitive for the user to figure out how to do something. There is an easy flow to the structure of the sites created in Sitecore. A developer can find an exact page to look at in Sitecore based on the URL that a user is looking at. I found that extremely difficult and time consuming to do in SDL Tridion.
I do not have an SDL Tridion license. If I did I would not be renewing the license.
How powerful of a CMS do you need?
Multi-site CMS?
Multi-language sites?
Scale of site(s) you will need?
Complexity of site(s) you will need?
Number of Content Authors, from how many locations?